May Day, 2008

Today I am very excited to announce that the Xaraproject is morphing into new life, as a Network of Public Charter Schools. For the past ten years I have straddled between the art and education worlds, developing the art and myth of Xara while serving as a member of a high-functioning and progressive school board. Now, in this initiative, the art and myth of Xara become the vehicle to reinvent public education on a new paradigm for a new world.

The Xara Learning Villages will be campuses of four progressive public schools serving students K-12. They will be real learning communities and schools for *our* children, employing the best lessons of developmental, transpersonal, positive, and humanist psychologies, the best methods of brain-based, project-based, and problem-based learning, and the best practices of servant-leadership, all built on the gift economy and creative-and-community ethos of Burning Man. Here, the future paradise world of Xara will literally build itself in the children who will build that world.

"Project-based learning" is an important theory in education, with lots of people talking about it and a handful really doing it well. The idea is to learn information and skills in the context of doing something practical and engaging. The curriculum is integrated so all the subjects are being introduced at once, as part of a whole cloth of connected meaning. Curiosity and interest drive learning, and meaning is individually constructed by each student. This, in my view, is a far more *natural* way for the human animal to feed the appetite to learn. Its rhythms and activities are naturally suited to what we now know about how the brain acquires, processes, catalogs, stores and prioritizes memory and meaning.

The Xara schools will structure all this on a gift economy - an ethos of service as the measure of a life. Work is not assigned and due as in some commercial transaction. It is a gift of personal pride. It is done because it is part of something fun everyone is doing together, getting ready to share with other people at upcoming learning fairs and family festivals. Moreover, like Burning Man, the projects must do more than just show that the students learned something. They must teach it to everyone else, and must do so in ways that are interactive, fun, engaging, whacky - and effective.

"Servant leadership" is a big concept in management and business these days - the idea of distributed leadership and responsibility among those who will do the real work. We have been calling it "do-acracy." The Xara schools take the idea all the way to the beginning, using it as the governance model for the school’s administration, and *also* with the children themselves as the self-validating motive for all work. It teaches responsibility to self and others while linking those virtues to our best ethical natures.

The schools will live a culture of radical kindness, creating emotional safety and celebration of risk and gaudy failure. Belonging begets giving. The teachers play an entirely different role in Xara schools, guiding students to find the questions, rather than announcing the answers. Teachers will stay with their classes from Kindergarten through Second Grade, assuring best individual understanding, continuity and commitment. The educational approach will continue the best practices of the most progressive preschools, fitting them to the State educational standards, and adopting them to the developing abilities and challenges of older children as they grow. The philosophy is holistic and ultimately playful, rather than mechanistic and ultimately coercive. The teacher becomes an improvisational artist, constantly inventing on the fly to engage a child’s interest in the whole curriculum. Most importantly, the teacher is a learner right along with the students, a teamleader, and models the role, curiosity and competence of the life-long master learner.

The Xara schools will feature a curriculum of HEART/EARTH:
Humanities, Engineering, Arts, Research and Technology.

It will emphasize issues and careers in sustainable development, environmental studies, resource conservation and management, policy planning, and of course, the arts. The campuses themselves will be a showcase of green building technologies, onsite energy generation, water reclamation, and indoor-outdoor classrooms, as well as the Xara aesthetic itself of buildings draped in greens, flowers and hanging gardens. I want to provide onsite, subsidized housing for the teachers, and give them access to all the schools’ labs, studios and facilities to work on their personal projects - like The Brewery artists loft in L.A. across from the Smashlab. For the right group of burner-type teachers, it would be a chance to live and work - sustainably - in paradise. Others need not apply. School starts the third week of September.

Yes, we will take the State’s standardized tests, and the kids will march in singing. We will teach the State standards, but we will also teach the things that matter. Our students will be good academics and good workers, certainly, but they will also be good husbands and wives, good parents, good citizens, good sports and good company.

Students will learn Spanish, and piano, and yoga, and a vast vocabulary from the first day of Kindergarten. They will learn carpentry and cooking, soldering and sewing, house painting and oil painting, gardening and welding, camping and woodcraft, and first aid and automobile maintenance and circuit design. They will develop a Burner’s do-it-yourself mentality, and also the Burner’s disdain for the “storebought.” The visual, performing and digital arts are all core curriculum, and so is the history of civilization, technology and comparative religion . A core value is the preference for cooperation over competition, and the Xara Learning Village schools will offer no competitive athletics. But there is a formal curriculum in manners and etiquette, taught from the beginning and modeled at all times. Debate is reinvented not as an exercise in competition, but rather as an exercise in active listening, constructive engagement and collective problem solving.

The idea goes on and on in layers of detail and theoretical edu-speak. But it is all in this spirit. In a school governed by a committee of teachers, the “head” of the school for ceremonial purposes is the “First Steward,” i.e., the groundskeeper/gardener. Why? Because he serves most humbly and looks after the most slow and patient things. (See, e.g., the character of Leo in Herman Hesse’s “Journey to the East.”) Also because he is *really* the school’s credentialed counselor and plays the archetypical role of the Understanding Angel and child’s advocate. All of this plays out the lessons of creative mythology, while giving a physical life to Xara’s own invented myth of collective progress toward a happier, healthier, and more harmonious paradigm for living.

The plan is to open in San Diego in September 09 with Kindergarten classes for the Garden School (K-2), and adding a grade level each year thereafter for the Xara Terrace School (Grades3-5), Xara Village Middle (6-8) and Xara Village High (9-12) through 12th grade. I am looking to open another Village in the Bay Area next, and replicate success from there across the State, the country, and the globe.

The charter school consultant I am working with is a like-minded fellow (if you can believe that) who sold his software company and retired in his 30's to hang out, do good, and raise his kids. He said another school he worked with took the slogan “A new school for a new century.” He thought that school never lived up to the promise, but that the Xara schools are new schools for a new millennium - for a new epoch. I say, new schools for a new world.

What do you say? Doesn’t this seem like a promising approach to making the world better and more hopeful? Wouldn’t you rather see your kids in this school than sitting in rows waiting for the bell to ring? Wouldn’t you rather have them as your neighbors when they grow up? Thinking about it, isn’t it the most bold, audacious and direct way that Xara could actually manifest its paradise possible?

Mark
May 1, 2008
mark-hinkley@cox.net


p.s. Oh, and there is even a party at the end. The culminating activity of the year will be the Xara First Families Festival, an outdoor, camping weekend, fund-raising festival displaying student and faculty art and projects, and inviting the public to come play along with kid-centered theme camps and hands-on activities. You’re all invited for the first annual event, coming in June of 2010. As the network grows and all the Villages will hold their First Families Festivals at the same time, they will be linked and webcast to one another, and offer chances for interactive shenanigans such as Neil’s remote, pushbutton SpaceBar.

The premise of this festival, by the way, is that the future Xara civilization gathers once a year to celebrate and remember the first families who began the road to Xara - meaning ourselves - in a festival celebrating its own still-brighter future in the imaginations, creativity, and playfulness of its children. Myth, it’s not just for bookshelves anymore.